With Hammertown, Peter Culley establishes himself as a stylistic virtuoso utilizing a startlingly broad range of reference to result in a body of work at once intimate and prophetic. It is above all a portrait of a town. Caught by a passing reference in George Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual to a “village on Vancouver Island,” Culley began to re-imagine his hometown of Nanaimo, not as it is, but as it might be imagined in the mind of a Parisian who had rarely left his city. The poems that make up Hammertown move through realms both linguistic and geographic, in which intersecting Old and New worlds, history, music and science change everyday life with both painful resonance and exotic rapture.